Black Side of the Green Line: Halcyon Siege

By David B. Hayze

When Agent Jim Popavich and his cadre of ethnically diverse U.S. Border Patrol Agents are abruptly ordered to surrender their guns and badges, the boundaries between ally and enemy quickly shift as they navigate through a brutal world where maniacal shadow corporations, second-rate drug cartels, bungling smugglers, and illegal aliens turned cold-blooded mercenaries will do anything for a piece of the American Dream…and the American continent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483538297

Book preview

liability.

Chapter 1

Load Van

In the southwestern-most part of San Diego there stood a massive, flat-topped dirt hill. Or, in the language of the southwest, it was called a mesa. On the top of this mesa was a small portion of the international boundary between the United States and Mexico.

About fifteen miles straight northwest up the coast stood the high rise luxury condos, hotels and office buildings of Downtown San Diego.

Visible just on the western side of this modern city scape was the curved ridge line of the Point Loma peninsula. It was shrouded by mist from the always thickening and dissipating Pacific coast marine layer. The tubular blue curve of the Coronado Bay Bridge slashed its way in front of it all. The whole scene scintillated under the soon to be blistering morning sun. And even for a Saturday morning, any observer could easily see from that vantage point that traffic on the nearby freeways was starting to get heavy.

On the Mexican side of the hill was the Ensenada Highway in Tijuana. It was busy with multiple lanes of east-west vehicle traffic all day, every day and every night, all of the time.

On the United States side, the massive hilltop extended north for about half of a mile and served as a great observation deck for Border Patrol Agents to keep watch over the nearby east side of the Tijuana River Valley. The view was clear and provided a clean picture of the Montezuma Road Bridge directly below it and to the north and to the Santa Malvada Port of Entry two miles to the east. And to the west they could look out into the Pacific Ocean for illegal marine activity. The hilltop and thus the vantage point were both situated near the polluted border shores of an otherwise prototypical Southern California beach town named Chivato Beach.

Just on the Mexican side of the hilltop, on the eastern slope, there was a massive concrete wall imbedded in the side of the hill and exposed in such a way that those looking from north to south could easily see it. Why it was there was a complete mystery. How it was still there was an even deeper mystery. Through simple visual observation any eye could see that it was in a clear state of perpetual decay. Perhaps it was built as a retaining wall or as a sort of foundation for the Ensenada Highway a few feet away from it back when the highway was originally built. No one seemed to know and no one could ever figure it out. Then again no one really put too much effort into trying to figure it out because no one truly cared.

The base of the wall served as a spot for the borderland homeless to congregate, boot heroin and defecate. It also served as a place for these seemingly country-less people to hide from entrepreneurial Tijuana police officers, who never squandered the opportunity to bolster their meager paychecks by stealing whatever pocket change they could from the Tijuana destitute. The base of the wall was also a popular staging area for soon-to-be aliens before making an attempt at illegal entry into the United States.

From where twenty-eight year Border Patrol Agent Frank Radman sat on the United States side of the naturally available observation deck, he could clearly spy on the action at the base of the wall through his binoculars. The names of towns and cities from all over Mexico were scrawled and spray painted in chicken scratch graffiti on the crumbling wall. Places like Tuxtla, D.F., Tamaulipas, Oaxaca, Culiacan and Guadalajara. Michoacán was by far the dominant name. It was written in every conceivable font and writing implement from charred chunk of wood to every shade of red, white and green spray paint.

Just on the north side of the wall, a tour bus came within one hundred yards of the international boundary and parked. Could this wall be what driver of the tour bus on the U.S. side pulled up there to see? A filthy concrete wall tattooed with graffiti? Possibly.

Or maybe they were there to see the newest addition to border infrastructure and implied dedication the United States had to the enforcement of its immigration laws. That had to be it. They must have been there to get a good look at the hotly debated, highly protested and quickly completed triple layer fence. The tax payer funded, ten billion dollar project stretched all the way from the most southwestern corner of the United States in Chivato Beach, California, to the western base of Tecate Mountain twenty-five miles to the east.

The massive construction project was initially proposed by an anonymous special interest group. The public suspected that this group was comprised of state and federal oligarchs who championed it with never ending advertisements and public speeches. The fact that the project’s vocal advocates also collectively owned several of the construction and technology companies that bid for and were awarded the construction contracts did not undermine the public’s growing mistrust and perpetual disappointment with its government.

The project was completed in just over six months. It was a world record completion time for a project of such immensity.

The project was simple enough on paper since it consisted primarily of three fences, a concrete moat, several drainage tunnels and two roads. The moat was to remain unfilled by any type of liquid anyone could drown in and therefore not technically a moat, but the deep V shape it sliced into the Earth gave its creators no other option but to call it a moat. The concept of the project was simple but by no means was the creation a simple task, no more than it could simply be called a collection of fences and roads. Physically and politically it was a behemoth.

And the fact that it went from concept to complete in a half of a year is a fact that only a few found either nefarious or worthy of speculation.

The fence system itself consisted of three parts. The first was a primary fence on the international boundary itself between the United States and Mexico. It served as the de facto demarcation line separating the two countries. It was there as an undeniable physical barrier proving that the boundary was real and not just a line on a map or in the sand. It was constructed of a twenty-five mile long series of metal bollards arranged in a short zig-zag pattern making it impossible to slip through for all but the most dedicated anorexics.

On top of it was a nasty trio of barbed wire, razor wire and concertina wire. It was arranged in such a fashion as to ensure that anyone who made it to the top of the fence would be impaled and lacerated from every direction and every angle whether they decided to retreat back into Mexico or proceed north into the United States. It added about an additional three feet of height to the primary fence and was very intimidating when seen from either side. Its pointed barbs and shiny blades glistened in even the dimmest moonlight.

The secondary fence was in some places along the twenty-five mile stretch only twenty feet north of the primary and in other places it was as far away as fifty yards. Its height was a constant twenty feet at all points and topped off with the same trio of wires bearing their metal thorns and quills. It was made out of a stainless steel and aluminum alloy sheet stamped into a mesh pattern woven so tight and at such an angle that you could see right through it to the other side as if it were almost transparent. This weave pattern also made it literally impossible to climb without a ladder or a grappling hook. At strategic locations throughout its twenty-five mile length were automatic gates that were opened via remote control and closed via timer.

Twenty yards north of the secondary was the tertiary fence. It was a simple chain link fence twelve feet high with a simple triple strand layer of barbed wire running along its length. It had manually operated gates to correspond with the automatic ones on the secondary fence. These remained in the locked position at all times.

Between the primary and secondary fences and between the secondary and tertiary fences were each a two-lane paved road. Each one was complete with polished black asphalt and yellow meridian. The only things missing from these roads that would make them ordinary city streets were the traffic signals, pedestrian crossing signs and chirping digital birds for the blind.

The fence system and accompanying road system ran in an almost straight line with the exception of a few minor curves here and there, but nothing too dramatic. The entire thing did have some dramatic ups and downs due to the hilly nature of the canyon-rich terrain. In the spots where the engineers thought that the construction of the fence and road system might be hindered by the depth of a draw or canyon, they simply filled it in with unfathomable quantities of dirt scraped from the tops of the adjacent mesas.

Armies of massive earth movers, enormous back hoes and earth scrappers with tires as large as trash trucks made land bridges as big as mountains to span the gaps between the canyons. This sculpted a once unapproachable slope into one smooth, almost flat, contiguous surface as easy to drive across as any flat open road on any flat open plane on earth.

This drastic transformation and manipulation of the landscape caused uproar in the environmental community throughout the entire state. It also gave open border advocates something to hide their human rights agenda behind. Motions were filed and petitions were submitted that normally would have slowed, brought to a grinding halt or completely put an end to any other project like this. But this one moved along as smoothly and as efficiently as the construction of a termite colony in an abandoned lumber yard.

The two very busy international Ports of Entry, or POE’s, in the twenty-five mile span were about twenty miles apart. The Santa Malvada POE was on the east side of the Chivato Beach area and San Savalo POE was even further east. Each one consisted of six lanes of freeway running south into Mexico and six running north into the United States. Plus there were pedestrian lanes heading both north and south of the east and west sides making each Port of Entry about a half of a mile wide. The engineers simply built bridges over each of them to get their fence project where it needed to go, and the fences were built on top of the bridges with seemingly little effort.

Towering along the entire northern span of the tertiary fence were massive silver camera poles that glimmered in the unrelenting Southern California sun. They were spaced about one hundred yards apart and stood fifty feet high. Each was topped off with a crow’s nest-like contraption that contained a standard daylight camera capable of clearly spotting activity up to five miles in any direction and a variety of infra-red cameras for reduced light operations. Each tower was also equipped with a laser pointer that fired a highly visible, thick red laser beam. The remote operators could use the beam to literally point out anything that they could see from the tower. Border Patrol Agents on the ground could follow the laser to the target when verbal direction over the radio proved to be insufficient.

The location of the remote operators, their identity, and even which agency they belonged to was a complete mystery. This operator secrecy made the Border Patrol Agents who worked beneath the shadows of the towers think that they were under remote surveillance more often than their illegal alien counterparts.

The camera system added an additional three hundred million dollars to the already staggering ten billion dollar price tag, making it the most expensive infrastructure project in federal law enforcement history. All was authorized and completed in a quick and clandestine manner. No one except for a handful of environmental and human rights groups protested. When the general public was made aware of what was going on at the border, most of them applauded it and its unnamed champions as a means to keep the United States sovereign and a way to finally keep at least one small stretch of the massive land border impregnable.

This was the perpetual juxtaposition that defined what the Border Patrol Agents who worked the border referred to as their Green Line: squalor south and spotless north. Glittering towers here and flaking concrete there. Respectable citizens trying to live their lives on the north versus the vandals wanting to rob them from the south. Such comparisons were easy for anyone to make anywhere along the Green Line between Mexico and the United States. For the Border Patrol Agents, their Green Line made a simple statement: This side is mine; that side is yours. Do not cross onto my side. The statement made by the Green Line was never obvious enough.

This had to be what they were here to see. Not the fence or the concrete wall, but the juxtaposition. How could it possibly be anything else?

Attention all agents in Zone 11, Radman’s voice crackled and hissed through the speakers of every service radio in the area. Looks like we’re gonna have a tour bus rolling up between the Sewage Treatment Center and the Sierra Tubes. Just a heads up guys. From his high vantage point he had a perfect view of everything that went on.

The title Sierra Tubes was euphemistic Border Patrol radio slang using the phonetic alphabet. Another word beginning with an s that better described the stinking, bubbling hideousness that flowed through the drainage tubes from Mexico on a daily basis would better suit Border Patrol parlance, but in order to comply with proper service radio etiquette, the word sierra would have to suffice. These tubes seemed to exist for only two uses. Both of which were of no help to the Border Patrol Agents who had to deal with them day in and day out.

Their first use was as a clear path under the primary border fence for aliens to walk through at will whenever they felt like bypassing the immigration laws of the United States. An alternative use of the Sierra Tubes was by the scores of homeless that lived in the border fringes to trash pick through the piles of debris that littered the north side of the fence and then return to homelessness in Mexico.

Their second purpose, the purpose for which they were originally built, is how they got their name. At any given time, thousands and maybe even millions of gallons of raw sewage and its accoutrements would deluge through the tubes straight from the toilets and storm drains of Tijuana and straight onto the streets of the Chivato Beach community. Most of the time it was just a trickle, but during rainy seasons the trickle was instantly transformed into a raging, frothing torrent of decrepitude that would thunder through like the White Rapid River. Only these rapids were a brownish gray-green, sometimes with a shade of dark mustard yellow.

Radman shook his head and mumbled. It’s Saturday morning in San Diego. There are beaches, parks, mountains, deserts, festivities everywhere. All that and these idiots just have to come here and hang out in some dirty rat hole between a sewage facility and a concrete bunghole with diarrhea. Unbelievable! Sitting in his vehicle he said this out loud to himself.

From his vantage point, Radman could see a passenger van pull up behind the bus. The words Border Tours were proclaimed in bright orange letters on its side. The passengers got out and were herded over to a spot where there was an even larger herd of gawkers. Now the bus and van tourists were in one large gaggle. What they had traveled this far south to Chivato Beach to gawk at, Agent Radman could not conceive. The fact that this many people would pay for a tour bus to drive to a place where they could stand on a Saturday morning and be shown such a cesspool convinced him right then and there that the average person could be conned out of their money very easily. He was always certain that someone with a little extra pocket cash would buy anything if it were pitched to them in just the right way. He was now witnessing for himself some positive reinforcement for his old convictions.

A guy in a red polo shirt holding a clipboard stood on a rock and started gesturing to the crowd, pointing at this and at that. His back was towards the border fences and Sierra Tubes. Traffic on the Ensenada Highway flew by from east to west just south of the border infrastructure. The tourists looked in his direction now. They appeared to Radman to be gape-mouthed with fascination, listening with rapt attention to every word spoken by the guy in the red polo shirt.

Their mouths are wide open near the Sierra Tubes, Radman thought as he spied on them with his binoculars.

Radman’s mind started churning with ideas of entrepreneurial endeavor while watching the gaggle of tourists. The closer he got to retirement, the wilder the ideas got and they came more frequently. From almost everything he experienced, his mind automatically tried to concoct some money making scheme out of it. All this entered into his mind while simultaneously being nauseated by the thought of billions of microscopic airborne fecal matter particulates gathering on the tongues of the gape-mouthed tourists.

Then from the corner of his eye he saw a group of aliens crawling low and slow through the brush-filled expanse between his high point location and the tour bus crowd. Somehow the group of aliens had successfully navigated their way through, over, or under the most expensive infrastructure project in the history of immigration law enforcement. The most likely explanation was that they walked right through the Sierra Tubes.

He had seen aliens low crawling through the scrub brush in that particular area hundreds of times before the fences had been built. Their routine was predictable. They would low-crawl through the brush until they got close to the road. Then they would get up and run as fast as they could across the road and get into the swampy vegetation where they would easily evade the agents trying to hunt them down. They would wait until it was dark out and the coast was clear, then start moving north again and maybe get picked up off of the side of the road by a load vehicle they had previously made arrangements with.

Radman figured he would wait and hope the tourists piled into their tour vehicles and leave before the aliens got too close to the road. The last thing he wanted to do was to give the gawkers what they probably really came to the border area for: the chance to capture what they would call condemning video of the locally loathed Border Patrol in the act of arresting illegal aliens.

Radman panned his binoculars back to the gawkers. They seemed to have no idea that there were aliens crawling through the brush nearby.

His hope was fulfilled this time. The tour guide stepped down from his rock and started to corral his herd of Sierra Tube gazers onto the bus.

The gawker activity must have spooked the aliens because they stopped dead in their low-crawl tracks and hunkered down in the scrub brush.

By the time Radman swung his binoculars from the tourists to the aliens and back to the tourists, they were already piled onto their respective vehicles and were on their way out of his area. Presumably they were on their way to other filth ridden pock marks along the border at which to marvel. He followed the bus to the main road with his binoculars. That was when he noticed the minivan parked on the north side of the Sewage Treatment Center.

In the algebra of patrolling the border, when there is a group of aliens moving at any rate of speed towards a van loitering anywhere nearby, the missing variable is always the same. When Radman swung his binoculars back to spy on the crawling aliens, they were already up and running full speed towards the van. Solve for the variable. Equation complete.

I got bodies. Looks like they’re gonna try and load up in a rusty old minivan parked in front of the Sewage Treatment Center. The words crackled through the service radio speakers with the nonchalance of a smooth jazz disc jockey on late night radio.

I got a hard count of ten. The guy in the lead is still in the field south of the road. About a hundred and fifty yards from the van and he’s on a dead run with the others in tow. Somebody better get there quick.

Radman had seen this scene repeated a thousand times before. But back in his earlier days as a younger agent, the groups of aliens had been much larger. Even though this group was a bit smaller, there was something unusually brazen about their actions. Several things struck him as bizarre.

One was that it was a Saturday morning with the sun bright in the sky. Aliens almost never pulled stunts like this in the broad day light. The other was that they got up and ran pretty much right in front of him. He was parked in plain view on top of a hill. He was in a spot that is manned twenty-four seven and all the alien foot guides operating in the area knew that. All the load drivers on the north side waiting to pick them up also knew that. In fact, every illegal alien, load car driver, squirrel, grain of sand and airline pilot thirty-five thousand feet up in a twenty-five mile radius that has ever even passed through the area in the last twenty-five years knew that.

So why the hell are these numb-nuts trying to load up right here in front of me? he thought.

This is about the dumbest thing I’ve seen yet, he said. He put his binoculars on the dashboard, shook his head and sipped from a deeply stained metal coffee thermos. And I’ve seen some really dumb shit out here.

After having worked on the line for the past twenty-eight years at all hours of the day, night and in between, his statement had a lot more value than the words could indicate. Radman’s work there was done. He spotted the traffic. He called it out. Border Patrol Agents who had time on the line like Radman were not expected to do much more than that. He picked up where he left off in last week’s Sunday edition crossword puzzle. Maybe he would check out the Sudoku puzzle next.

This is Agent Avila. If no one’s closer, I can roll on that, rang another voice over the service radio.

Border Patrol Agent Jake Avila got his first adrenaline dump of the day at the prospect of sacking up ten aliens, a load driver and a van. His radio voice told a different story though, a rather unenthusiastic one. He too had seen this many times before, but nowhere near as many times as Radman. He had mixed feelings about responding to traffic like this.

Is ten minutes or so of excitement really worth the twenty hours of admin work to follow? Is it really going to be worth the endless report filing and keyboard typing in the office during the processing segment? They just shred all that shit anyway, he thought. He already knew the answer: It was never worth it, especially when both the aliens and smugglers rarely, if ever, got any more punishment for their crimes than a slap on the wrist.

Jake waited thirty seconds for some other sap to get on the radio and respond to the alien traffic in pursuit of Border Patrolian glory. His idea was that if he waited long enough, some other gung-ho fool would decide to play hero and stop the van before it loaded up and drove to the freeway entrance a mile or two north up the road. The other sap would get the aliens, the van, the glory and the paperwork. Dead silence on the radio. No takers. He was the only sap.

Screw it, he muttered to himself. He put his vehicle in drive, keyed his microphone and asked the remote camera operator to eyeball his area from above while he abandoned it to go and stop the minivan. He sped off without waiting for a reply. He figured the operator was watching him and his area anyway.

The Sewage Treatment Center, or STC, was on a moderately traveled side road that had an on-ramp a mile or two north of it that connected to Interstate 18, a major east-west freeway that everyone in the area referred to simply as The Corridor. Once a vehicle loaded up and got on the freeway it was considered officially to have evaded arrest. No high speed pursuits of any kind were tolerated by the front office types of the Border Patrol Oversight Staff. Any agent who broke that rule ended up on the rubber gun squad. That meant at least one year’s worth of being what the Border Patrol Agents abhorrently referred to as the Paper Bitch. As the name implies, the Paper Bitch’s time is spent mostly on menial tasks such as paper filing, phone answering, meal serving to temporarily detained aliens, coffee fetching for management and other assorted busy work meant to further demoralize an already downtrodden agent. Paper Bitch was an appointment that most people did not join the Border Patrol to be a part of.

With the idea of becoming the Paper Bitch at the forefront of Jake’s mind, he floored the accelerator of his Jeep over a bumpy dirt road leading from the border fence to the front of the STC. Everything inside the Jeep was transformed into a projectile if it was not bolted to something. Jake could see the van parked on the side of the road and a handful of aliens in various stages of getting into it through the sliding doors on both sides. Three more aliens who had no chance of squeezing into the minivan were abandoning ship and making a run for the thick swampy foliage across the street as he made his approach.

The Jeep’s eight cylinder engine roared as it flew up a small dirt incline and onto the blacktop. Jake floored the accelerator until he slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt next to the driver’s side of the van. He came within inches of running over some of the would-be passengers that were still in the street.

He got out of the Jeep and used its front end as a shield between himself and the van’s occupants. He drew his side arm, thrust it forward and pointed it at the driver’s face.

The load van was in deplorable condition. It had what looked to Jake like a sliding side door that had, at some point during its life, been painted maroon, but was now sun faded into a dull, lifeless, pinkish hue. The driver’s side door was various shades of primer gray and the baked roof might have been blue at some point. The hood was pitted with patches of rust cancer. On the inside, he could see that the bench seats in the back had been taken out in order to cram as many bodies into it as contortion could allow. And, to top it all off, the rear passenger window was replaced with a flattened out cardboard box that was duct taped into place. Jake had not even seen the passenger’s side yet.

"No se mueve. Nadie!" Jake yelled to the aliens. Those aliens still in the street that had not already run into the brush froze in their tracks upon hearing Jake’s command.

Hey, it’s okay, man. We’re cool, said the van’s driver. His hands were already poking out of the window, a textbook move that was straight out of the LAPD Vehicular Hot Stop Procedure Guide. His double chin flapped away as he spoke. He was smiling from ear to chubby ear.

You just shut up and keep your hands where I can see them. Apparently you already know the drill there, slim, Jake said to the rotund driver. He could tell right away that the guy was a veteran of getting pulled over when he started obeying commands before they were even given.

"That goes for you too, mija. Manos afuera," he said to the woman in the passenger seat. She complied and put her hands out the window.

"Todos rodillanse. Manos en las cabezas!" The aliens next to the van all complied with Jake’s command by kneeling in the street and putting their hands on their heads.

Now for you two. Get out of the vehicle at the same time and put your hands on your heads. Get your fingers interlaced. Move to the front of the vehicle.

Both the driver and his female passenger complied with Jake’s every command without fail. He was always astounded by the fact that even the most non-compliant of arrestees instantly did whatever they were told to do once a gun was pointed at them. He never bothered to not point a gun at any suspect any more.

The thing that made this the most unusual of smuggling events was not the fact that it was attempted during the broad daylight. Nor was it the fact that only three of the ten aliens bailed out and ran into the brush since usually they all do that at the first sight of a Border Patrol vehicle. It was the fact that the driver and passenger, who bore a familial resemblance to each other facially, were both grotesquely obese way beyond the point of what a physician might call morbidity. But, since Jake was so pumped full of adrenaline and constantly scanning back and forth between the aliens in the street and the drivers for weapons, he did not even notice the van gain six inches of height when the driver and passenger got out as he instructed. In fact he did not even notice how fertile with visible lipids they were until they hulked around to the front of the van to where he had maneuvered himself.

Holy shit, was the first thing Jake spontaneously muttered to himself as he watched them labor into position. Any thought about the aliens in the street or the ones in the brush had totally escaped him. He was fascinated by the immense girth of these two. Similar to the way one might marvel at the size of a dead mule’s bloated torso as its innards bloat and burst through its decaying skin in the beyond brutal midday desert sun.

He snapped out of his trance. This is serious. This is serious. He kept mentally reiterating the phrase like some sort of mantra to keep himself focused on the task at hand and not their massive, undulating girth. This is no time to be spacing out over a couple of spandex enormities, he thought.

Okay, both of you turn around. Get on your knees and put your hands on the hood of the minivan. Then he thought better of it; a command like that could take forever for these two to execute.

No, wait! Put your hands on the hood first. Then kneel down. That, he thought, might help speed up the process a little bit. Every little bit of help he could muster was going to lubricate this situation along.

He approached the male first, figuring that he’d be the more likely of the two to be carrying a weapon. He did not worry too much about their quick draw even if they did have guns, so he holstered his. Jake then pulled out a pair of cuffs from the back of his utility belt as he approached the two from behind.

He could hear the wail of sirens approaching his position from the west.

That’s got to be Baxter, he thought.

He slapped one cuff on the big fellow’s left wrist, grabbed his squishy right arm and swung both arms around his sweating, quivering love handles. It was a vain attempt to secure the cuffs on both wrists in one swift and efficient movement. But, the man’s enormous midsection was just way too wide to allow a single set of cuffs to do the job.

What the…dude?! Jake said out loud as he tried to pry the guy’s arms together.

Ow! Hey man! Be careful back there. I don’t bend like that, said the driver with a wince in his voice.

That’s funny. I don’t remember telling you to say anything. Jake slapped the fat man’s right hand on the top of his sweaty head. Don’t move that hand!

As Jake reached back on his utility belt again to get another pair of cuffs to daisy-chain together, Baxter arrived on the scene with sirens and overheads blazing away. He screeched to a halt just behind the minivan, threw the driver’s side door of his Jeep open and struggled to keep it open with his left foot while simultaneously fumbling with his holster in an attempt to liberate his gun. He managed to get the gun out and transition it from his right to left hand and thrust it out in the general direction of the van. He used his free right hand to grab the Jeep’s public address microphone. When he keyed the microphone, the speakers at once erupted in a piercing belch of squealing high frequency feedback that even Jimi Hendrix would have found offensive.

On any other day, Bax would have called in sick being as hung-over as he was. But for reasons even he could not discern, he felt the tugging need to go to work that morning despite the fact that he spent the previous evening indiscriminately pouring beers down his throat at the local pub until three a.m.

Jake, you all right over there? Baxter yelled into the microphone. Birds in the trees across the street took flight, perhaps never to return to the area. Ever.

Yeah Bax, I’m cool. Everything’s cool. It’s safe. Come on over here and give me a hand, Jake yelled back.

Okay, Bax replied. He got out of the Jeep, reached back in and grabbed his straw cowboy hat which he then crowned his bald shaven head with. His foot falls pounded the blacktop with the unmistakable sound of wooden heeled cowboy boots and grew louder as he approached. The aliens and their smugglers could feel the shockwave his steps created on the blacktop through their knees.

Bax approached the front of the van and stepped up on the curb adjacent to the front passenger side where the fat lady knelt. She still had her hands on the hood of the van.

Jake was busy applying daisy-chained flexi-cuffs to the aliens kneeling in the street and calling for another agent to swing by and transport them back to the station for processing. Now that Bax was there as back up, he could begin processing them by writing down some of their biographical info as well.

Bax looked down through his mirrored shades at the fat lady as she knelt against the van, both hands on his hips. He snickered out loud as he thought about what a complete lack of self-respect she must have and how much more even that had been denigrated by the physical position she was currently in.

She looked back at him, and Bax thought he might have seen a sneer of the condescending type developing on her face.

Hmmm. Is that a little attitude I smell in that look she just gave me? Bax thought.

He extended his right hand and pointed with slow and deliberate care down to the curb where he stood, his left hand still on his left hip. Ma’am, come over here and have a seat, he said to her.

She turned and looked Bax straight in the eye. Pfft. Fuck you! she said to him. I got a heart condition. I don’t have to move nowhere for no one. Then she broke his gaze and looked into the trees across the street. Jake, the cuffed male partner-in-crime, and even the daisy-chained aliens watched her defiance with rapt fascination and disbelief.

Baxter just sighed and with a slight shrug of the shoulder said Okay then, allow me to assist you in obeying my command.

Bax stepped off the curb, took two long steps and came to a stop behind the fat lady. He paused for a moment and craned his neck around in all directions scanning for pedestrians like an owl scans for things that might try to kill it. Saturday morning had turned into Saturday afternoon. There could be a potential witness lurking in plain view and watching from any direction.

There were no pedestrians anywhere.

Perfect, Bax thought.

Bax grabbed the chubby lady with both hands by her curly brown hair and started dragging her backwards away from the van. Somewhere in the tangled mess he managed to grab a hold of some shirt collar as well. The chubstress howled and reached up behind her in a pathetic attempt to scratch herself free from Bax’s helping hands, but he just kept on dragging. He hooked a quick left and dragged her over to the curb and flipped her onto her protruding belly where she flopped around like an elephant seal on the Sewage Treatment Center’s meticulously manicured curbside grass.

He somehow managed to control her flailing hands and handcuffed her behind her back, then sat her up straight on the concrete curb. Her face was studded with beads of sweat, streaks of grime, stray grass clippings and loose top soil. She pouted her lips and blew lock of hair out of her eyes.

You bastards! I’m going to sue the shit out of you and him, she nodded towards Jake who stood and starred in total disbelief along with the now frightened to death aliens. A bead of sweat dripped into her eye. She winced, and then started to cry.

Nothing but idle threats, ma’am. You aren’t going to sue anyone. You’re going to prison, said Baxter. He stood behind her, hands on hips, grinning from ear to ear and flashing a thumbs up sign to Jake. The only thing missing from this picture, Jake thought, was the rifle, the safari truck and the African Savannah as Bax stood over his trophy as if she were a prized water buffalo.

Her rotund partner hung his head in shame.

Transport unit, copy, Jake said into his portable radio.

This is transport. Go ahead, Jake’s radio replied.

Transport, do you know where we just took down that load vehicle?

That’s affirmative, the radio crackled in response.

Then get over here right away. We’re going to need to clear the area ASAP.

Ten-four. I’m already on the road.

Luckily, the transport van was already en route. It arrived a few minutes later and carted the would-be smugglers and aliens back to the station to be officially booked as offenders of U.S. immigration law.

After the transport van left, three more agents arrived on the scene riding All-Terrain Vehicles. They dismounted their metal steeds, immediately dove into the brush and with minimal effort, dug the remaining three aliens who fled the scene out of their hiding places.

They were all taken to the Chivato Beach Border Patrol Station and run through all documentation systems. The three aliens that ran and hid in the swampy brush were found to be what are referred to in the business as ag felons, slang for aggravated felon.

The aggravated felony convictions that the three Mexican nationals had were nothing out of the ordinary. They were typical convictions for crimes such as Home Invasion, Grand Theft Auto, and Possession of Burglary Tools complete with a Burglary conviction. The Burglary conviction that accompanied the charge of possessing burglary tools was a prime indicator that the thief had gotten clumsy and was caught in the act. Either that or he was remarkably stupid. There were also the standard criminal charges such as Resisting Arrest and Possession/Intent to Distribute Narcotics. And of course, there were the three criminal convictions that many arrested by the Border Patrol in the Chivato Beach area automatically seemed to come with just as cars automatically come with a steering wheel. That was the ever-present trio of Driving While Intoxicated, Corporeal Injury to Spouse or Cohabitant, and Child Molestation.

According to many of the arrestees, these three criminal acts should not be considered crimes since none of those things are crimes in their countries of origin. The criminal aliens and the open border advocates’ reasoning was that the age of sexual consent in most countries south of the border was twelve, give or take a few years. Also, there are no drunk driving laws out in the ranchos of the third world to speak of. And finally, the general consensus was that every wife or girlfriend needs a good beating now and then. The problem was that the aliens never bothered to check the rules and regulations of their new locales after they illegally entered into them.

Hey Jake, that was a high quality apprehension. Another minute and they would have gotten away spoke a female voice.

Sandy Berger greeted Jake as he walked into the alien processing center through the outside sally port entrance. Sandy was senior to Jake by a year and was working on an intelligence gathering detail by interviewing smuggled aliens. It was primarily an office gig but it suited her perfectly.

"Yeah, you can thank old Radman up there for his ajos de la aguila on that one."

"Uh, Ajos? Jake, you mean ojos. Ojos de la augila. I hardly think Radman had cloves of garlic in his eye sockets when he spotted the van."

"Oh. Yeah. Right, right. Ojos not ajos. I always get those mixed up."

Jake Avila was an umpteenth generation Mexican-American. For all he knew, his ancestors were among the ten thousand or so Mexicans living in California since before it became part of